No election is won with Facebook alone

You do not win with Facebook alone: this is one of the conclusions that can be drawn from the study conducted by researchers from the Millennium Institute for Foundational Research on Data (IMFD), who –in an interdisciplinary effort– analyzed the social media and ground campaign work of 80 candidacies in the 2017 parliamentary elections.

The study involved political scientists, communications scholars, and data scientists, who produced an interdisciplinary investigation. The combination of “political and communication theories, with quantitative and qualitative data analyzed using techniques from the social sciences and computer science, allows for a much more comprehensive understanding of the case,” explains Sebastián Valenzuela, co-author of the work and academic at the Facultad de Comunicaciones de la Universidad Católica.

The study, “Much Ado About Facebook? Evidence from 80 Congressional Campaigns in Chile” was published in June in the Journal of Information Technology & Politics (JITP), a scientific journal of the American Political Science Association (APSA), with a high impact factor in the social sciences, according to the score awarded by Web of Science, one of the leading international academic databases.

“We managed to understand highly complex phenomena, such as social media campaigns, by drawing on the different perspectives each of us brought, from computer science, communications, and political science. This greatly enriched the arguments and enabled a much more refined approach to understanding the phenomena,” adds Sergio Toro Maureira, academic at Public Administration and Political Science at the Universidad de Concepción.

The results of the study also reveal that the content posted by candidacies on social media differs according to the socioeconomic level in which the campaign is taking place: in districts with higher income levels, content focuses mainly on the programs presented by the candidacies, while in districts with lower income levels, it is used “as a non-programmatic relationship tool, basically focused on showing how the candidate meets with people,” explains Sergio Toro.

“In that sense, more than the party or the resources the candidate has, even more than their ideology, what matters is which district they are competing in, and that determines how they use Facebook and for what purpose,” explains Juan Pablo Luna, IMFD researcher and academic at the Escuela de Gobierno UC and Ciencia Política UC.

“People who compete in working-class sectors use it to announce field events, such as fairs, door-to-door canvassing, etc, while the others use it for more programmatic mobilization, which reinforces the idea that political representation in Chile works very differently -or worked in 2017, before the social uprising- depending on the socioeconomic level in which one operates, and that the poor have one type of representation, and the rich, another,” she adds.

At the academic level, the study “offers an interesting perspective in the field of political communication and the study of the effects of social media on politics, by focusing on a country in the global south,” explains Andrea Escobar, UC political scientist and IMFD assistant researcher. Most of these studies usually focus on developed countries, where relevant factors such as economic inequality in campaign strategies can be ignored, which is why this work makes it possible to assess the use and impact that social media have in more unequal contexts. The researcher also highlights the relevance and pertinence of the research, “in light of the results we saw in the recent constitutional convention elections in our country, where the importance of grassroots campaigning and organization for elections was evident, beyond what can be observed on social media alone.”

The following participated in the research:

Juan Pablo Luna, academic at the Instituto Ciencia Política and the Escuela de Gobierno de la Universidad Católica de Chile, associate researcher at the Millennium Institute for Foundational Research on Data.

Cristian Pérez, academic at the Department of Political Science of the University of Florida, USA.

Sergio Toro, academic at the Departamento de Administración Pública y Ciencia Política de la Universidad de Concepción, Chile, associate researcher at the Instituto Milenio Fundamentos de los Datos.

Fernando Rosenblatt, academic at Ciencia Política en la Universidad Diego Portales, Chile, researcher at the Instituto Milenio Fundamentos de los Datos.

Bárbara Poblete, academic at the Departamento de Ciencia de la Computación de la Universidad de Chile, researcher at the Instituto Milenio Fundamentos de los Datos.

Sebastián Valenzuela, academic at the Facultad de Comunicaciones de la Universidad Católica de Chile, associate researcher at the Instituto Milenio Fundamentos de los Datos.

Andrés Cruz, master’s degree in Ciencia Política de la U. Católica, academic at U. Diego Portales.

Naim Bro, postdoctoral researcher at the Instituto Milenio Fundamentos de los Datos.

Daniel Alcatruz (BA, Universidad de Concepción) assistant researcher at the Instituto Milenio Fundamentos de los Datos.

Andrea Escobar, political scientist at the Universidad Católica de Chile and assistant researcher at the Instituto Milenio Fundamentos de los Datos.